From time to time, the Republican Party seeks to divert and entertain its extremist wing by promoting highly improbable amendments to the Constitution. You know the kind, amendments that would ban same-sex marriages or outlaw abortion, allow prayer in the public schools or make it a crime to burn a flag.
Since the Constitution cannot be amended without the concurrence of two-thirds of the House and Senate and three-quarters of the states, these amendments go nowhere, which makes the far right restless and requires its keepers in the party to dream up new distractions.
With illegal immigration the fear of choice this season, the party has now come up with an unusually vicious faux amendment that would actually deny citizenship to some children born in the United States, the children of illegal immigrants.
Passage of the amendment would make these babies the only native-born children denied American citizenship since the children born into slavery before 1865.
At the end of the Civil War, Congress passed and the states ratified the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, which, as we memorized in history class, freed the slaves, made them citizens and gave them the right to vote.
Ratified within 15 years of the war’s end, the amendments were the major postwar achievements of the new Republican Party, great moments in Republican history, proudly recalled to this day on the party’s website, GOP.com.
The amendments to free the slaves and make them citizens, GOP.com tells us, received the unanimous support of the Republicans in Congress and the 15th, giving the slaves the right to vote, saw some Republicans abstain “because it didn’t go far enough,†while the Democrats were nearly unanimous in opposition to all three amendments.
But now, prominent members of the party that freed the slaves and made them citizens are asking us to amend the 14th Amendment, which states that:
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.â€
Sen. Lindsey Graham and other Republicans who would add an exception to all persons born in the United States, make the ugly claim that illegal immigrants “come here to have babies. They come here to drop a child. It’s called ‘drop and leave.’ To have a child in America, they go to the emergency room, have a child and that child’s automatically an American citizen.â€
And why do they go to all that trouble? They do it because the citizens born to illegal immigrant parents can, upon reaching the age of 21, petition the United States to grant citizenship to the father and mother who dropped and left them 21 years before. Believe it or not, it’s a conspiracy that takes 21 years to germinate.
As Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Connie Schultz wrote last week, Graham and the others would have us believe “hundreds of thousands of immigrant mothers, heavy with child, were navigating rivers and deserts, outwitting U.S. agents and dodging gun-wielding vigilantes so they could heave themselves upon America’s shores and head for the nearest emergency room. Just in the nick of time, they’d deliver babies who would take their first breaths as Americans — and later make their parents citizens, too.â€
But it’s kind of sad, isn’t it, that struggling to make your child an American citizen is a subversive activity in 21st-century America?
Dick Ahles is a retired broadcast journalist from Simsbury. He may be reached by e-mail at dahles@hotmail.com.
